1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the configuration of a laser apparatus used for a semiconductor device manufacturing process and other purposes. In particular, the invention relates to a laser apparatus used to improve or restore, by application of laser light, the crystallinity of a semiconductor material partially or fully made of an amorphous component, a substantially intrinsic, polycrystalline semiconductor material, or a semiconductor material whose crystallinity has been lowered being damaged by ion application, ion implantation, ion doping, or the like.
The invention also relates to a laser illumination system used for a low-temperature process for producing TFTs that are used in a liquid crystal display device and, more specifically, to a technique for forming, on the same substrate, thin-film transistors having a large mobility disposed in a peripheral circuit area and a number of thin-film transistors having uniform characteristics disposed in association with respective pixels.
2. Description of the Related Art
A panel used in a process for manufacturing a liquid crystal display generally has a peripheral circuit area and a pixel area. The peripheral circuit area has a role of controlling the value of a current flowing through each pixel. As semiconductor devices in the peripheral circuit area have a larger mobility, the circuit configuration of the display can be made simpler and the display is allowed to operate at higher speed. On the other hand, pixels have a role of holding information sent from drivers. If semiconductor devices in the pixel area do not have a sufficiently small off-current, they cannot hold such information. Further, if off-current values are much different from one pixel to another, the pixels display differently the same information sent from the drivers. For the above reasons, a technique is now required which allows semiconductor devices having different characteristics to be selectively formed on the same substrate.
In recent years, extensive studies have been made to decrease the temperature of semiconductor device manufacturing processes. This is largely due to the necessity of forming semiconductor devices on an insulative substrate made of glass or the like, which substrate is inexpensive and has high workability. In general, when a glass substrate is exposed to a high-temperature atmosphere of 600xc2x0 C. or more, it expands or is deformed, for instance. Therefore, it is now desired that the temperature of semiconductor device manufacturing processes be reduced as much as possible. The decrease of the process temperature is also required from miniaturization and multi-layering of devices.
In semiconductor device manufacturing processes, it is sometimes necessary to crystallize an amorphous component of a semiconductor material or an amorphous semiconductor material, to return to the original crystalline level the crystallinity of a semiconductor material which has been lowered by ion application, or to improve the crystallinity of an already crystalline semiconductor material. This is because if such materials are crystallized, the mobility of resulting semiconductor devices can be made very large.
Conventionally, thermal annealing is used for the above purpose. Where silicon is used as a semiconductor material, the crystallization of an amorphous material, the restoration of an original crystallinity level, the improvement of crystallinity, etc. are attained by performing thermal annealing at 600 to 1,100xc2x0 C. for at least several tens of hours.
In general, the processing time of such thermal annealing can be shortened as the temperature increases. On the other hand, almost no improvement is obtained at a temperature lower than 500xc2x0 C. Therefore, to decrease the process temperature, it is necessary to replace a conventional thermal annealing step with some other proper step.
There is known, as one of the techniques for satisfying the above need are, a technique of performing various kinds of annealing by laser light illumination. Since laser light can supply high energy equivalent to that of thermal annealing to a desired, limited portion, this technique has an advantage that it is not necessary to expose the entire substrate to a high-temperature atmosphere. In general, there have been proposed two laser light illumination methods.
In a first method, a CW laser such as an argon ion laser is used and a spot-like beam is applied to a semiconductor material. A semiconductor material is crystallized such that it is melted and then solidified soon due to a sloped energy profile of a beam and its movement.
In a second method, a pulsed oscillation laser such as an excimer laser is used. A semiconductor material is crystallized such that it is instantaneously melted by application of a high-energy laser pulse and then solidified.
The first method of using a CW laser has a problem of long processing time, because the maximum energy of the CW laser is insufficient and therefore the beam spot size is at most several millimeters.
In contrast, the second method using a pulse oscillation laser can provide high mass-productivity, because the maximum energy of the laser is very high and therefore the beam spot size can be made as large as several square centimeters.
However, to process a single, large-area substrate with an ordinary square or rectangular beam, the beam needs to be moved in the four orthogonal directions, which still remains to be solved from the viewpoint of mass-productivity.
This aspect can be greatly improved by deforming a beam into a linear shape that is longer than the width of a subject substrate, and scanning the substrate with the beam.
The remaining problem is insufficient uniformity of laser light illumination effects. Pulsed oscillation lasers as represented by an excimer laser in which laser oscillation is obtained by gas discharge have a tendency that the energy somewhat varies from one pulse to another. Further, the degree of the energy variation also varies with the output energy. In particular, when illumination is performed in an energy range where stable laser oscillation cannot be obtained easily, it is difficult to perform laser processing with uniform energy over the entire substrate surface.
Another problem associated with the use of a pulsed oscillation laser is that the laser light energy decreases as the laser is used over a long time, which attributes to degradation of a gas necessary for laser oscillation. This does not appear to be a serious problem because the laser light energy can be increased by raising its operation level. However, in practice, raising the operation level is not preferable because once the operation level is changed, it takes some time for the laser light energy to be stabilized.
By the way, it is conventionally very difficult to produce, only with laser light illumination, a crystalline silicon film having such a large mobility as enables fast operation of a liquid crystal display. In view of this, a method of improving the crystallinity after laser light illumination has been proposed in which thermal annealing for crystallization is performed at about 550xc2x0 C. for several hours before the laser light illumination. Although this method can attain a mobility (about 20 cm2/Vs) as required for the pixel area and the off-current is small (about 10xe2x88x9212 A) and has a small pixel-to-pixel variation (on the same order), it cannot provide a mobility (more than 100 cm2/Vs) as required for the driver area.
We have already proposed the following method for solving this problem.
In the first step, a metal element such as Ni is added to a semiconductor material that is deposited on a glass substrate. Various substances other than Ni can be used as long as they serve as nuclei when the semiconductor material is crystallized. However, according to our experiments, in the case where the semiconductor material is amorphous silicon, the addition of Ni effectively produced silicon films having the best crystallinity. The following description will be limited to the case where the impurity is Ni.
Among various methods of adding the impurity is a method of applying a nickel acetate salt solution to the surface of a semiconductor material.
In the second step, the Ni-added semiconductor material is kept at a high temperature. Where the semiconductor material is an amorphous silicon thin film, a crystalline silicon film is produced by keeping the Ni-added amorphous silicon thin film for 4 hours in an atmosphere of 550xc2x0 C. During this heat treatment step, Ni penetrates through the semiconductor material and crystal growth proceeds with Ni serving as nuclei. Thus, a crystalline film of the semiconductor material is produced.
In the third step, a film having better crystallinity is produced by applying laser light to the semiconductor material. The above-described linear laser light is used in this step. The laser light illumination is performed such that before application of strong pulsed laser light, preliminary illumination is conducted with weaker pulsed laser light. This allows formation of a semiconductor film having highly uniform crystallinity. The two-step illumination is effective in suppressing degradation of the uniformity of the film surface due to laser light illumination.
The reason why the preliminary illumination is effective in obtaining a uniform film is that a crystalline silicon film obtained by the preceding steps still includes many amorphous portions in which the absorption factor of laser light energy is much different from that of a polycrystalline film. That is, the residual amorphous portions are crystallized by the first illumination, and the total crystallization is accelerated by the second illumination. The two-step illumination is very advantageous, and can greatly improve the characteristics of completed semiconductor devices.
To reduce the degree of abrupt temperature change of a silicon film surface due to laser light illumination, it is preferred that during the laser light illumination a substrate be kept at 100 to 600xc2x0 C. It is known that in general an abrupt change in environmental conditions impairs the uniformity of a substance. By keeping the substrate temperature high, the degradation of the uniformity of a substrate surface due to laser light illumination can be minimized. No particular atmosphere control is performed; i.e., the illumination is performed in the air.
The mobility of a crystalline film thus produced depends on the semiconductor material and the laser light energy. Where the semiconductor material is silicon, a crystalline silicon film having a mobility of more than 100 cm2/Vs can be obtained. Although the mobility generally increases as the laser light energy is increased, it starts to decrease at a certain high energy level.
Although thin-film transistors formed by using a crystalline silicon film produced by the above method have a high mobility, they have large off-current values that vary very much from one transistor to another (two to five orders). (The off-current variation becomes almost unnoticeable if the laser light energy is so reduced as to provide a mobility of 20 cm2/Vs.) The variation of off-current values adversely affect the pixels, and causes point defects and line defects in a completed liquid crystal display.
As described above, a pixel-to-pixel variation of the off-current in the pixel area causes fatal defects for the operation of a liquid-crystal display. However, it has been proved that a variation of off-current values of thin-film transistors disposed in the peripheral circuit area does not have large influences on the operation of a liquid crystal display. It has also been proved that while a large mobility (larger than 100 cm2/Vs) is required for the peripheral circuit area, a relatively small mobility (about 20 cm2/Vs) is sufficient for the pixel area.
Based on the above discussions, an appropriate laser light application scheme is such that high-energy laser light is applied to the peripheral circuit area and low-energy laser light is applied to the pixel area (see FIG. 8).
However, the scheme of individually applying laser beams of different energies to the peripheral circuit area and the pixel area makes the laser light illumination step complex and time-consuming. For example, if the peripheral circuit area is illuminated while the pixel area is masked, and vice versa, this process takes long time and becomes complex because of two times of illumination. Further, if the above-described two-step illumination is employed, this scheme needs four times of illumination.
An object of the present invention is to provide, by solving the above problems, a laser illumination system which can perform illumination at constant laser energy even using a pulsed oscillation laser.
Another object of the invention is to provide an apparatus which allows the above-described laser light illumination method to be performed in short time in a simple way.
To attain the above objects, the invention is characterized in that an energy attenuating device as represented by a light attenuation filter and an energy measuring device as represented by a beam profiler are used in combination.
That is, in the invention, a laser is oscillated at an output level at which the laser operates in as stable a state as possible. Further, by additionally using the energy attenuating device, the laser light intensity is adjusted to illuminate an object at an optimum energy.
In the invention, it is preferred that the energy attenuation factor of the energy attenuating device be continuously variable. But it may be discretely variable. That is, the invention is summarized such that the laser light energy as output is set higher than the above-mentioned optimum energy and the laser light energy is adjusted to the optimum energy by using the energy attenuating device. In doing so, the laser is caused to operate in an energy range where it can oscillate in as stable a state as possible. As the laser continues to oscillate over a long time, the laser light energy tends to decrease. In the invention, this energy reduction is compensated by adjusting the energy attenuating device. That is, the invention is characterized by enabling laser light illumination to be always performed at a constant energy by attenuating, in the initial stage, the laser light energy by the energy attenuating device by an amount equal to the energy reduction in the final stage, and gradually reducing the attenuation factor as the laser light illumination proceeds. This is why it is preferred that the energy attenuating device is continuously variable.
According to another aspect of the invention, a laser illumination apparatus producing a large-area beam spot is combined with a device (hereinafter called an energy attenuating device) capable of attenuating the energy of the large-area laser beam at different attenuation factors for respective portions of the beam. By virtue of using such an energy attenuating device, laser light illumination is conducted only once, which contributes to increase of the throughput. Even if the invention is combined with the above-described two-step illumination, illumination is conducted only two times.
If the energy measuring device is added to the above system, the laser light energy can be controlled more precisely. In general, pulsed lasers such as an excimer laser has a tendency that a certain degree of variation occurs in the laser light energy even if the laser output is kept constant. This problem may be solved by, for instance, changing the laser output itself (operation level) in accordance with a variation of the laser light energy, or by changing the energy attenuation factor of the energy attenuating device. The former method is not appropriate in the case where the laser light energy needs to be controlled very precisely, because the laser oscillation itself becomes unstable when the laser output is changed. On the other hand, since the latter method does not change the laser output, the laser oscillation does not become unstable. Thus, the latter method is advantageous over the former method. However, the latter method needs to use the energy attenuating device having a variable energy attenuation factor.
The laser illumination system having the above configuration enables formation of a silicon film having regions of different electrical characteristics on the same substrate by changing the laser light illumination energy. Further, by using the above-described energy attenuating device, it becomes possible to perform laser processing with throughput equivalent to that as would be obtained when laser illumination is conducted without changing the laser light illumination energy. By forming a number of TFTs on the thus-produced silicon film, TFTs having a large mobility and TFTs having a small off-current can be formed on the same substrate. By using this technique, an active matrix liquid crystal display device can be constructed in which the peripheral circuit area is constituted of TFTs having a large mobility and the pixel area is constituted of TFTs having a small off-current.